(File Photo) Jimmy Smith, from left, Robin Donnelly; Judge Mike Bradford, Luis Sanchez, and Randy Prude listen to citizens during the Commissioners Court public hearing at the Midland County Courthouse in the

The Midland County Commissioners’ Court voted unanimously Monday to contribute $25,000 to the Midland Memorial Foundation for a Mental Health Study. The study conducted by the Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute will look at the state of mental health and mental health care in Midland with the goal of closing the community’s need gaps.

“We’ve watched (the state of mental health) for years and been a part of the discussion in Austin and kept telling the Legislature we’ve got some mental health needs in the state and they’re woefully underfunded,” County Judge Mike Bradford said.

Bradford said if those in the jail population with mental illness don’t get treatment then they just sit there and “what good is that to anybody?”

“Secondly, if they’re facing a charge and they have to be reasonably attuned to what the charge is,” Bradford added. “You have to be able to stand trial or go to a hearing and understand what’s going on and they can’t without some intervention. So all that does is keep building the cost in the jail and nobody gets any help.”

One of the reasons the county decided to fund a study was the death of Sgt. Mike Naylor last year. Naylor was a believer in keeping non-offending mentally ill out of the jail and providing avenues to true help, as evidenced by his founding of the Sheriff Office’s Crisis Response Team (CRT), which responds to crises caused by person with a mental health issue. Naylor was killed in the line of duty in the course of responding to such a call.

Midland Memorial Hospital, Midland ISD, the Scharbauer Foundation, the Abell-Hanger Foundation, United Way, Permian Basin Community Centers and the county are working together on this new mental health initiative.

“There are lots of different niche organizations (in the area),” said Russell Meyers, MMH CEO. “We’re going to try to get them all to the table so we have a complete compendium of everything that’s available here, how much money they have, who they’re serving, who has a need that they can’t serve, and once that’s all compiled, we can target where the biggest bang for our bucks might be.”

Though there remains a lack of licensed psychiatrists and psychologists in the area, Midland has more resources than it used to.

“I’ve been here for almost 13 years,” Meyers said. “When I first came here, Midland didn’t have an inpatient psychiatric provider or an inpatient drug and alcohol provider at all. So every patient we saw in ED that was in crisis we had to ship mostly to San Angelo, sometimes to the Big Spring State Hospital. Now we have both (referring to The Springboard Center and Oceans Behavioral Hospital).”

However, Meyers and Bradford hope that this study will delve deeper into a problem they both know already exists: how to successfully use limited resources with what appears to be a growing mental health crisis. The study will focus on the entire continuum of mental health issues, not just crisis care.

“We, for a long time, have identified children and adolescents as being basically unserved,” said Meyers. “They’re not unserved, but there’s just nowhere near enough resources for the amount of need.”

Meyers added that the study also will help identify the mental health needs for those who don’t necessarily have a severe mental illness. “You can work around the edges but that’s a huge population -- people who are not psychotic -- but their life could be much better if they had access to mental health services,” Meyers said. “Those are in such short supply that that’s going to be a big part of this study. How do you even understand how big the need is? You can pretty much judge the need for those who have (a severe mental illness) because they usually end up in the jail, the ER or both.”

The less severe mental health issues also can cause problems, officials said.

“We have noticed two things, and they are counter cyclical,” said Bradford. “When the economy’s down we see more (mental health-related issues). Those are actions that are carried out in families, so we see them in family courts, we see them in violence as evident from losing an officer last year, and we see them in volumes of all age groups that we’ve never seen before. We’re seeing more young people doing stuff in the school system that this community should be able to help with (referring to, for example, suicidal outcries).”

This study, officials said, will give community leaders and health care providers hard data to develop better action plans to tackle these issues.

“On our end, we want to take away the stigma of saying, look I’ve got a problem,” Bradford said. “If you take away the stigma, then you get a lot accomplished.”

Half the battle is simply getting people to admit they need help, Bradford said. This is particularly true for the veteran community, members of which the county is seeing more of in the courts.

“That is something we’re trying to answer. The reluctance of that serviceperson to say they need help,’” said Bradford. “It’s not weakness. We’re seeing them in volumes we haven’t seen in a long time and we are now adding avenues to address them. But the hardest part is you can’t get them to tell you anything.”

Nine out of 10 Texans think talking about a mental health condition is more difficult than talking about a physical condition, according to statistics from the Meadows Mental Health Policy Institute.

One of these avenues is that the county recently decided to fund the drug court and mental health court separately, in order to avoid finding “single remedies for dual problems,” said Bradford.

Meyers and Bradford hope this study will help disperse the volume of mental health-related problems that too often fall on the jail or the ER. “The single biggest thing that could happen for me would be that mental health patients don’t come to the ER,” Meyers said. “If you come to our ER, unless you’re actively intoxicated or attempting to kill yourself, there’s not much we can do for you. So if those people can make their first point of contact with the system a place that can actually help them, that’s a really great goal.”